A few regrets but this Edith is worthy of an Oscar

Although recordings of Piaf herself mostly provide her singing voice, the glamorous Cotillard - with the aid of amazing make-up and costumes - makes herself look uncannily like the diminutive chansonnier, uglifying herself with horrific teeth, turning her curvy, 5ft 6in frame into the tiny, angular one of the 'little sparrow' (despite the size of her voice, Piaf stood only 4ft 8in).

Cotillard's lustiness generates extraordinary sexual electricity.

She gives the role a drive and depth that will surely win her an Oscar nomination.

Scroll down for more...

There are marvellous sequences, too, especially a dreamlike one when she learns that the love of her life has been killed in a plane crash - a terrific combination of fluid camerawork and expressionistic lighting by director Olivier Dahan.

Unfortunately, Cotillard's performance seems to squeeze the life out of everyone else around her.

Even Gerard Depardieu seems underpowered as Louis Leplee, the impresario who dragged her out of the gutter and was found shot dead in mysterious circumstances.

The screenplay by Dahan and Isabelle Sobelman is atrocious.

There are confusing and pointless flashes back and forth in time. Characters appear and vanish with insufficient context or explanation.

The script is shambolically structured, incorrigibly verbose and disastrously bloated.

Piaf comes across, pretty accurately, as a character easier to admire from afar than to like, close up.

She survived a childhood so ghastly that even Dickens might have rejected it as melodramatic - abandoned by her mother, brought up in a brothel and exploited as child labour by her drunken, street-contortionist father.

Childhood illness made her temporarily deaf and blind, and even as a young woman she was crippled with arthritis. Drink and morphine helped speed her physical decline, and by her death at the age of 47 she looked like a bag-lady of 88.

But the film-makers don't really have an angle on Piaf.

Was she impulsively profligate, or a stingy freeloader who could out-mean Cherie Blair?

Was she exploited by those around her, or was she exploitative herself?

By the end, we're no clearer on these paradoxes than we were when we went in.

At least La Vie En Rose will alert a new generation to Piaf's magnificence as a performer.